Yes, he would devote himself to the Cause. But he, unlike Tiberius, would find room in his life for other things. For family affection. For the beauty of moor and wood and burn. For the possibility of love in an arranged marriage. For an ideal not driven by anger and bitterness.
I’ll do my duty, Lord Greyburn. But I’ll do it my way, not yours.
Braden believed with all his heart that it was a promise he could keep forever.
Sierra Nevada Mountains, California
Cassidy pushed the door open with her foot, ignoring the frightful groan it made, and let the armful of branches and kindling fall to the ground near the fireplace. She paused to catch her breath, wiping dirty hands on her equally dirty pants. Dry, brown leaves swirled into the house before she could shut the door, joining those already piled in the corners of the tiny cabin.
Mother had died when the first leaves began to fall, and now the trees were halfway bare. Cassidy went to the larder and looked at the few bags and canisters that remained of the cabin’s stores. It wasn’t a lot of food, even for her, with winter coming on. And she wasn’t a hunter like her mother, or a big, strong man like Father had been before he went away. Not even Morgan was here to help find more food before the snows came.
“You’re a strong girl,” Mother had said in the weeks before she died. “You have the true Forster blood, God help me. The blood I wanted to forget—”
Cassidy closed her eyes and crouched by the fireplace, snapping a brittle piece of kindling between her hands. She had memorized almost everything Mother said to her those last few weeks, because it was important. Mother had known there was something wrong with her, and so she’d tried to explain things that would help Cassidy afterward.
Most of it Cassidy knew: how to build fires, cook simple meals like biscuits and what she called “mush,” soften the dried meat stored for winter. She knew where to find the best water and where the berries grew, how to judge the weather and keep warm in the snow.
But Mother hadn’t told her how to be so alone.
Leaving the wood where it lay, Cassidy left the cabin and trudged to the small hill behind the house. The mountains were high and sharp all around. The sky looked like a lake thrown upside down. Trees shivered in the wind.
There was nothing here to show when or where Edith Holt had died. Cassidy had done what Mother wanted her to do. They had spent their last night together away from the cabin, in a quiet tree-shaded hollow Mother loved, where she often went to Change. “Give me to the wild,” she’d said, while her eyes closed and her breath became quieter and quieter. “Let me lie here. Do not come back, Cassidy.”
She hadn’t gone back, not after she’d cried all the tears inside her, and kissed Mother’s forehead, and pushed up some of the pine needles and fallen branches and leaves about the still body. She’d known Mother wouldn’t be cold, but it helped a little to do it anyway.
The sky and trees and mountains had been just like today when Father left, nearly a year ago. Cassidy never knew why he went away, though Mother tried to explain. Something about silver, and money, and things that hadn’t meant much to Cassidy then, when she was only six. All she knew was that she missed him, and Morgan when he left just after the snowmelt to find Father.
Father wasn’t like Mother. He couldn’t Change. He couldn’t become a beautiful, perfect wolf who could run like the wind and vanish like a shadow.
Morgan was. He’d learned to Change just before he left. He wasn’t afraid of anything.
But he’d never come back. Neither of them had. And Mother was never the same after that.
Cassidy sat on the bare ground and listened. Sometimes she thought she could still hear Mother’s howl, echoing through the valley. Father would come in from the pasture, and Morgan from the field, and they’d all go to greet her when she ran from the woods, her skin gleaming and her hair loose, with a rabbit or a pair of grouse for dinner.